belated Avignon report

Looks like I never said anything about my Avignon trip. So here’s a quick report.

One of the things we too often forget about France is how beautiful the countryside landscapes are. For this reason, the TGV is always a visual pleasure no less than a convenience owing to its speed.

As for Avignon itself, I’ve been wanting go for about 5 years, as part of a wider program of visiting as many smaller French cities as I can. For years I really only knew Paris, so have started to do a few side-trip each time I stay here. In 2010 (my last long Paris stay) it was Nantes and Lille, both of them lovely. Before that it was Rheims, Dijon, and then other parts of Burgundy near Dijon, for a bit of atmospheric background while writing about that notable Burgundian author, Bruno Latour.

The Palaces of the Popes is obviously the big historical highlight, especially since I’ve been reading a bit about Occam over the past year. Avignon was a big place in the England-born Occam’s life and work, of course, since it was from Avignon that he and some colleagues stole the Papal seal and fled in the midst of a dispute. It’s always nice to have an actual geographical/architectural image in mind for such cases to replace the self-generated images of them.

The only problem with losing those self-generated images is that the are so much feebler than real memories that, once you’ve seen the real thing, the initial fantasy images are gone forever and usually beyond retrieval. What was my visual image of Cairo, for instance, pre-2000? I am no longer able to reconstruct it. I have no recollection at all of what I expected Cairo to look like.

This was obviously not the best season for a trip to Avignon. Much was closed or semi-closed, and I didn’t get a full taste of what look to be beautiful trees when the season allows for it. (Despite Avignon being almost at the Mediterranean, it was far colder yesterday than Paris.)

There’s also an issue in Avignon with a sizable population of disturbed people, many of them young. The number of evident alcoholics, drug addicts, and mentally ill people on the streets was quite striking. An American friend who knows Paris well reminded me that Nostradamus is also from Avignon, and that there is talk of a magnetized underground lake beneath the city, thought to be responsible for the anomalies of both Nostradamus’ own mentality and that of a number of the city’s present-day residents.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly nice city and most of the people are fine. But there were a few street corners that made me feel like I was in a French version of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”